Inspection systems identify and classify defects on semiconductor wafers to generate a defect population on a wafer. A given semiconductor wafer may include hundreds of chips, each chip containing thousands of components of interest, and each component of interest may have millions of instances on a given layer of a chip. As a result, inspection systems may generate vast numbers of data points (e.g. hundreds of billions of data points for some systems) on a given wafer. Further, the demand for ever-shrinking devices leads to increased demands on inspection systems. The demands include the need for increased resolution and capacity necessary to infer the root causes of identified defects without sacrificing inspection speed or accuracy.
However, the use of design data associated with the wafer typically impacts the overhead, and thus the throughput, of an inspection process. For example, a utility for the generation of care areas based on design data may provide large data files specifying various attributes of care areas that must be transferred to the inspection tool. Further, an inspection tool may need to register the design data with the sample to correlate the design coordinates with the coordinates of the inspection tool.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method for curing shortcomings such as those identified above.